Y2K Psychology: "Nothing can go wrong"

This book review of "Isaac's Storm" by Erik Larson was discussed and excerpted as part of a recent "open and frank exchange of views" in the c.s.y2k newsgroup (is there any other kind?). The book chronicles the famous Galveston Storm of 1900, which left thousands dead, and the actions of the head of the Galveston bureau of the U.S. Weather Service, Isaac Cline.

Couple of those excerpts:

...But the lesson of Larson's book is that Galvestonians had plenty of obvious warning that a big storm was coming. They knew what hurricanes could do. Like passengers on a sand-spit Titanic, they just refused to believe they could be in any danger. They caught streetcars to the beach to thrill at the sight of pier-perched bath houses the size of hotels being consumed by enormous waves. They could hear--and even feel--the stunning impact of those waves all the way across town. Boys and girls sailed washtubs delightedly in the wind-whipped streets as they flooded. The first intimation of what the storm would do, one survivor wrote, "came when the body of a child floated into the [railroad] station."

By then it was too late to leave...

...But to Larson, Cline is not so much a villain as the personification of the intellectual self-certainty of the turn of the century--an attitude that a dozen years later would collide with a celebrated iceberg in the North Atlantic, and two years after that meet its death on the battlefields of France. Cline had plenty of company in ignoring the storm warnings, including his Weather Bureau colleagues in Washington and Havana, who refused to permit seasoned forecasters in Cuba (dismissed as excitable Latins) access to the bureau's West Indies reporting network.

Even as Galveston was counting its dead, a disdainful Weather Bureau official claimed that the hurricane could not have been the one the Cubans warned about when it passed over that island, because, he said, hurricanes never turned left. It had to have been another storm altogether...

Actually I rather liked your post. Since nothing exactly like Y2k has
ever happened before we have to reach into the "bag" for any analogy
that might give us some valuable information or insight. I love the
way the Weather Bureau tried to slip out of this disaster. Maybe the
best of the Polly posters will try the same thing. "It couldn't have
been a Y2k problem that caused all the screw-ups because that was
reported as basically fixed and can't turn around and become unfixed.
It must have been something else that created all the problems."

I thank you for the honorific of "Professor". One of my favorite
fictional characters is Professor Bernardo de la Paz in Heinlein's
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress:

"A managed democracy is a wonderful thing, Manuel, for the managers...
and its greatest strength is a 'free press' when 'free' is defined as
'responsible' and the managers define what is 'irresponsible.'"

I apologize for my lack of clarity in posting the review. The parallel
between the two situations, only one of which we can view with the
benefit of hindsight, seemed obvious enough, but apparently was not.

Calling the Y2K problem "a design flaw" does not lessen its potential
impacts in the least. Stating that a bridge collapsed due to a "design
flaw" is cold comfort to anyone standing on said bridge.

Abstract concepts that involve 1) thinking, 2) sacrifices in the
here-and-now, 3) benefits only in the future, and 4) admitting that
one is wrong about somthing fundamental - this is always a hard sell.
Y2K is like Hurricane Camille is coming to YOUR town, when there has
never been a hurricane before, and you are trying to convince people
to evacuate. Y2K currently is simply beyond the mental abilities of
most people. When the power shuts off and stays off, then the masses
will have a longer attention span for Y2K than a hyperactive
6-year-old the morning after Halloween, but not until then.